Oops! IRS Accidentally Posts Social Security Numbers on Website

Just when you thought the IRS had done enough to demonstrate their incompetence, along comes a story this afternoon that the government agency mistakenly posted thousands of Social Security numbers to its website.

The incident involves the unwitting exposure of “tens of thousands” of Social Security numbers, according to a recent audit by the independent transparency and public-domain group Public.Resource.org. The identifying numbers were on the Internet for less than 24 hours after being discovered, but the damage was done. And unfortunately, the data-breach concerns some of the most sensitive types of transactions: Those made by nonprofit political groups known as 527s.

Every so often, 527s have to file tax forms to the IRS, which then get added to a database. The database itself is hardly a secret; the IRS has been sending updated records routinely to Public.Resource.org and other public-interest groups, and it’s a favorite among political reporters. But when the IRS told the group’s founder, Carl Malamud, to disregard the Form 990-Ts included in the agency’s January release, he took a closer look at the files in question.

After analyzing the breach, Malamud wrote a letter to the IRS pointing out 10 instances where a social security number was accidentally revealed on the government’s website—just a small sample of the larger breach.

Remember when Dem Rep. Elijah Cummings told us that the IRS scandal was “solved” and it was “time to move on?” Spin and excuses aside, this is just another black mark for an agency riddled with scandal over the last few months. And it is ANOTHER reminder that while Republicans in Congress are pushing for more oversight over the IRS, Democrats are turning the other cheek.

About the AuthorRusty Weiss

Rusty Weiss is a freelance journalist focusing on the conservative movement and its political agenda. He has been writing conservatively charged articles for several years in the upstate New York area, and his writings have appeared in the Daily Caller, American Thinker, FoxNews.com, Big Government, the Times Union, and the Troy Record. He is also Editor of one of the top conservative blogs of 2012, the Mental Recession.